Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, announced today that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will invest $3 billion dollars in a new project, informally called Chan Zuckerberg Science, with the goal of curing, preventing and managing “all diseases” in the next generation’s lifetime.
The ambitious project will bring together leading scientists from around the world, to conduct targeted research into the top causes of death globally: heart disease, infectious disease, cancer, and neurological disease. The initiative will also support research into other diseases, accidents and violence, and hunger.
$600 million of the investment will go towards Biohub, a new physical location in San Francisco that will bring together researchers from Stanford, Berkeley, and The University of California San Francisco with engineers in order to find new ways to treat disease.
Biohub is part of one of three focuses of the initiative, to unite scientists and engineers from around the globe, in digital as well as in-person collaborations. The project will also focus on building new tools and technology to tackle these diseases, and increasing funding for this kind of scientific research.
The two-hour announcement of the new project was, of course, broadcast on Facebook Live. Watch it below:
